


the art of catfishing

by novelized



Category: Glee
Genre: blam being bros, catfishing!, i can't believe i wrote this?, i think i'll write a porny sequel, so much catfishing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-17
Updated: 2013-03-17
Packaged: 2017-12-05 13:39:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,004
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/723895
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/novelized/pseuds/novelized
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ryder's being catfished. Sam and Blaine just want to help him out. </p><p>It's never that easy, though.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the art of catfishing

Thankfully, Sam’s observant.

Blaine doesn’t really know anything’s going on until, after school, Sam comes up to his locker and leans in close. “Ready for another Blam secret mission?” he asks, which gives Blaine a little thrill, and not just because he can smell Sam’s chapstick from only a few inches away. He is always ready for another Blam secret mission.

“Hit me,” Blaine says.

Sam straightens and looks at him very seriously. “Ryder,” he says, “is being catfished.”

The thing is, part of being friends with Sam Evans is that sometimes he says things that don’t always make sense, and usually Blaine just rolls with it. Sometimes he speaks in made-up languages and sometimes he does outdated impressions that no one understands. But even this one manages to catch him off guard. “I’m sorry, he... what?”

“He’s being catfished! You know, with the—the internet thing, and the fake profile—dude, do you even watch MTV?”

Even if Blaine wanted to watch MTV, which he doesn’t, there aren’t enough hours in the day. Not between stealthily taking down Sue Sylvester and prepping for Regionals and keeping up with his and Kurt’s moisturizing routine, even if Kurt’s moved on to bigger and better facial creams. But Sam looks really determined, so he hesitates and says, “I mean, sometimes.”

“Catfishing is, like, someone makes a fake Facebook and starts chatting you up, and that leads to sexting, and then you show up at their house and discover that they’re actually a 40-year-old man, or a band nerd that’s only hot in Myspace angles, or your little brother or something.”

“Ryder’s little brother is sexting him?” Blaine says, disturbed.

Sam sighs and runs his fingers through his hair. “No. I mean, probably not. But _someone_ is playing him like a fool, and he’s falling for it. Look, he forgot to log out when he was done on the computer—rookie mistake number one, am I right—” (Blaine nods sagely) “—and I went to google protein shake recipes, and I saw he’s been talking nonstop to this girl named Katie.” He makes really exaggerated quotation marks with his fingers. “Like, hundreds of messages over the last week. And Katie—” he does it again, which is really distracting, so Blaine reaches out and grabs his hands to still them, “—is this crazy hot girl, right? I went through all of her pictures, and I’m thinking, damn, get it Ryder, and then I come to the last one.”

Blaine, a little regretfully, lets go of Sam’s hands. He usually needs them to drive his point home. “And?” he urges, hooked.

Just as he’d suspected, Sam slams a fist into his other palm. “There’s a watermark!” he says triumphantly. “It’s tiny, but it’s there, and it’s this other girl’s website. So I went there. Hundreds of pictures of this same girl, and you know what her name is?”

“I’m guessing not Katie.”

“It’s Cindy! Or, like, Stephanie, or something, I forget, I got distracted by her boobs. But definitely not Katie.”

Blaine presses his lips together, giving himself a minute to digest this information. If Ryder really was being set up for some cruel joke, wasn’t it his responsibility to intervene? Not as Ryder’s buddy—he barely knew anything about the kid, which was sort of sad, seeing as they’d been sitting in the same choir room for an entire semester—but as a good person. He knew there had been some love triangle drama between Jake and Marley and Ryder. He also, unfortunately, knew about turning to strangers on the internet for the attention you weren’t receiving elsewhere.

He knew how much it sucked.

“Okay,” Blaine says, turning to Sam resolutely. “What do we do?”

x

What they do, apparently, is set up a fake profile of their own. 

“Isn’t this kind of wrong?” Blaine says unsurely, watching Sam fiddle with his keyboard. Usually he waits for Blaine to open the door, but today he’d just burst into his room and sat at the computer like he owned the place. “Aren’t we supposed to get him to _stop_ talking to people he doesn’t know, not encouraging him to talk to more?”

“We just have to see how in deep he is,” Sam says without turning around. “Maybe he doesn’t actually have plans to meet up with this Katie chick, you know? Maybe he’s just messing around because he’s bored and he’ll talk to anyone that pops up.” He pauses. “Give me a girl’s name.”

“Hillary,” Blaine offers. “Michelle. Condoleezza.”

Sam gives him a weird look. “I’m going to put Samantha. Get it? Sam? Samantha?”

For the next half hour, Blaine checks over Sam’s homework while he works on the setup, because he doesn’t really _care_ if he goes with the blonde or the brunette, and he still thinks this whole thing is weird. Finally, though, Sam puts on his astronaut voice and says, “Houston, we have contact,” so Blaine sits up and squints over Sam’s shoulder at the screen. Sam very diligently types out the first message, then erases it, tries again, backspaces, then stops to think. After about thirty rough drafts, he comes up with the final product: 

_hey._

“Nice,” Blaine says, and he’s mostly being sarcastic, but Sam gives him a thumbs up anyway.

He presses enter.

There’s a long moment—Blaine’s guessing Ryder isn’t the fastest typer in the world—and something’s pulling at the pit of Blaine’s stomach, because this feels wrong, but Sam’s the one who’d watched the entire first season of the MTV show. Sam’s the self-claimed expert. Sam’s the one who’d decided they needed to help Ryder in the first place.

Another ten seconds, and then:

**_ryder_lynn_ ** _is now offline._

Blaine looks wordlessly at Sam.

“Well, damn it,” Sam says, looking defeated. He clicks out of the profile but doesn’t, Blaine notices, delete it. “Onto phase two, I guess.”

“What’s phase two?”

Sam abandons the computer in favor of divebombing onto Blaine’s bed, wrangling two of the xbox controllers out from their box and not-so-inconspicuously shoving his homework clear out of the way. “I have no idea,” he says simply, and then pushes one of the controllers at Blaine. “But for now, game on.”

x

Blaine’s brushing his teeth, later that night, when he hears his computer ding from his bedroom. He considers ignoring it, but there’s a chance it’s someone he really wants to talk to—not naming names—so he hurries in there, toothbrush dangling from his mouth, and shakes his mouse to wake the screen. To his surprise, it’s not Kurt with his weekly Bachelor thoughts, and it’s not Sam with a late night burst of inspiration.

It’s Ryder.

**ryder_lynn:** _Hi. Sorry I missed your mesage earlier, had to do some homework. Who’s this?_

“Oh no,” Blaine says out loud, lifting his hands away from the keyboard as if that would absolve him of some crime. “No no no...”

He looks to his left and right, but of course there’s no one there to help him. So he does the next best thing: he grabs his phone, dashes to the bathroom to spit the toothpaste out of his mouth, and calls Sam.

Luckily, Sam’s always been the type of guy that answers on the first ring. “What’s up?” he says. “Did you want another lullaby or something because I told you, bro, that was a one time thing—”

“You didn’t log out!” Blaine says, cutting him off. “That fake account, you didn’t log out, and Ryder just sent me a message—”

Sam sounds genuinely excited about that, which is completely the wrong reaction to have. Sometimes Blaine wants to strangle Sam. “What’d he say?”

“He was doing homework earlier, and he wants to know who I am. I mean, who you are— _we_ are—this girl, whatever. What do I do?”

“Play along!” Sam says. “Look, man, this is for the greater good. I’ll tell you everything to type, okay? We’re saving Ryder’s life here.”

Blaine’s not so sure about that. About any of this. It had seemed merely insane at the time; now it seems insane and stupid, which is Blaine’s least favorite combination. Still, though, he sits by the computer. Tentatively clicks back to the message. “He’s still online,” Blaine says. “What do I say?”

“Say—” Sam makes a contemplative humming noise. “Tell him your name’s Samantha, you got his screenname from a ‘hot guys of McKinley’ Facebook group.”

Blaine pauses before typing. “Does that actually exist?”

“Yes,” Sam says. “I made it.”

**dreamingof_u:** _My name’s Samantha. I found you on the Hot Guys of McKinley Facebook group... hope it’s okay that I messaged you._

“Did you seriously make the screenname _dreaming of you_?” Blaine demands. 

“Shut up, I was on a time limit.”

**ryder_lynn:** _Didn’t even know I made the list! Pretty awesome. Of coarse it’s ok... I always have time for pretty girls._

“What’d he say?” Sam asks, after the computer dings and Blaine sits in tortured silence for a minute.

“He called me pretty,” Blaine says flatly. “Sam, why are we doing this? What exactly is this supposed to accomplish?” 

“We just need to do a tiny bit of digging. Find out how much he thinks he knows about this Katie girl, how crazy he is about her. So we can stop him before he makes a stupid mistake.”

“Why can’t we just confront him in person?”

“Ryder thinks this girl is the real deal, dude. How would _you_ feel?”

Blaine tries to imagine, for a second. Like if he’d met Kurt online first. If they’d spent weeks talking, growing close—and then someone dropped a bomb on him, someone he didn’t even know knew about their thing in the first place.

“Defensive,” Blaine says. “And embarrassed, probably. And ticked off.”

“Exactly. So you gain his trust, start asking a few questions, then let _Samantha_ blow the lid off. Ryder deletes his profile, doesn’t ever mention it again, boom, we saved him from a lot of unnecessary embarrassment.” 

This still doesn’t totally feel right. Blaine thinks there’s got to be a better method, something a lot less deceitful, but he’s drawing a blank right now, and besides, Sam’s enthusiasm has always been infectious. “So what am I supposed to do? Talk about the weather?”

“Sure, if you want to be the lamest lameass of all time. Remember, you’re a hot girl. Talk about hot girl stuff.”

Like that’s helpful.

Blaine’s about to ask for more guidance when Sam’s phone beeps and he says, “Ah, man, my parents are calling, I have to answer or they’ll freak. Text me updates or something, okay? Just go with the flow. See you tomorrow, dude,” and before Blaine has a chance to interrupt, he hangs up.

So now it’s just Blaine and Ryder. Ryder and Samantha. Blaine and Ryder and an imaginary girl. 

Great.

**dreamingof_u:** _So you play football, right? I’m a fan._  
**ryder_lynn:** _Really?? I mean, I know some girls like football, but I havent met any yet._

Blaine bangs his head against the computer screen. He is the worst hot girl ever. That, or Ryder relies too heavily on stereotypes. This is terrible.

**dreamingof_u:** _By that I meant I like a guy in football pads._  
**ryder_lynn:** _Ahhhh. That makes more sense. So what else do you like?_

From there, surprisingly, the conversation is—not terrible. They talk about music. Ryder admits that after _Grease_ he’d watched every movie musical he could get his hands on in one weekend, and he’d had dreams that involved big song-and-dance numbers for a solid two weeks after. They talk about going to Kings Island as kids; Ryder had thrown up on The Beast rollercoaster and didn’t go back for three years. Blaine-as-Samantha makes up some stuff about having parents that work a lot but are pretty good at leaving money for takeout, except he’s not too keen on lying, so it’s really not all that made up. Ryder said that he understands, and he talks about his super successful parents, who’ve unintentionally made him feel like an underachiever for most of his life.

He learns more about Ryder in a three hour conversation that he has in an entire school year.

And then it sinks in that it’s been _three hours._

“Oh my god,” Blaine says, rubbing at his cramped fingers in disbelief. He doesn’t even know how this happened. He’s going to murder Sam.

**dreamingof_u:** _Wow, I didn’t realize what time it was._  
**ryder_lynn:** _Woah. Me neither. Time flies when you’re having fun.._  
**dreamingof_u:** _Good night, Ryder._  
**ryder_lynn:** _Night :)_

Blaine crawls into bed feeling incredibly weird. This is so going to backfire, he thinks, and it’s not even until he’s halfway asleep does he realize he’d never even tried to ask about Katie.

x

“I’m not doing it anymore.”

“Dude, you have to.”

“No. I refuse.”

“Yeah, and what happens if you stop?” Sam is eating an apple in between words. Usually watching Sam eat is distracting, because after all this time it’s still a wonder how he fits so much in one mouthful, but today Blaine’s mind is on other things. Like how he’d ducked into a janitor’s closet to avoid passing Ryder in the hall, because he was sure he’d try to give him a harmless smile, and he was sure that harmless smile would dissolve into him spilling his guts about last night. Sam takes another massive bite. “He wonders where you disappeared to, he hunts down your IP address, he finds your real address, he shows up at your doorstep, you have a lot of explaining to do.”

“Sam!” Blaine says, panicky. He hadn’t even considered that possibility.

“The other alternative is that you carry out the plan as... well, planned.”

Blaine glares at his bagged lunch. This is how he knows he’s in a bad mood: he’s mad even at his tuna sandwich. “Fine,” he says. “But tonight you’re coming over and doing the talking.”

x

Sam shows up at his house with black stripes under his eyes and a half-eaten bag of Doritos, looking ready for war. 

“You know no one’s actually going to see you, right,” Blaine points out, but Sam ignores him and adjusts the invisible walkie talkie on his invisible uniform.

“The subject has been spotted, over,” he says, and then makes an awful staticy sound with his mouth. Blaine shoves him in the shoulder. 

“You’re a dweeb,” Blaine says, “over.”

Sam tackles him on the stairs.

Their wrestling match lasts about all of fifteen seconds before Sam rolls over onto his back on the landing, breathing heavily, even though neither of them had exerted any real energy, and Blaine hadn’t even pretended to land a single punch. Still, though. This is what they do.

“Did your mom make brownies?” Sam asks, without moving.

“Like three days ago, they’re kind of stale now—”

Sam pops up without notice and disappears into the kitchen. Blaine rolls his eyes, but he’s glad, at least, that he’d taken their conversation about Sam’s body to heart. An entire month of occasional candy bars and potato chips and he still has the best abs Blaine has ever seen outside of porn.

Their sleepover was centered around a goal, but by seven o’clock Ryder still hasn’t come online, and they’re both too restless to sit around and wait for him. Instead, Sam breaks out Call of Duty, and Blaine whoops his ass for half an hour, and revels in it too. After a relatively long stretch of not talking, though, Blaine glances over at Sam out of the corner of his eye. “Hey,” he says, “you know what we haven’t really talked about yet? Who do you think Katie really is?”

Sam actually presses pause and puts down his controller for that one. “Whoa,” he says. “I didn’t even think about that. Good question, dude.”

“Do you think it could be someone he knows? I mean, he and Jake seem to have made up, but maybe Jake’s doing this as some sort of revenge.”

“I don’t know,” Sam says, “Jake doesn’t really seem like the type. What about Unique? She was pretty pissed at Ryder a few weeks ago.”

“For good reason,” Blaine says pointedly. “Besides, she’s already forced to live a double life. I don’t think she’d want to have another one.”

Just then, the computer beeps, and Sam scrambles up off the floor. “About time,” he says, bending over the screen and shaking the mouse. He takes a second to read whatever new message they’ve received, but then he turns around with a funny look on his face.

“What?” Blaine says, immediately self-conscious. He moves to the computer and leans in to read for himself.

**ryder_lynn:** _Hi. I’m glad your here. I’ve been thinking about you all day._

“What,” Sam says, “did you _do_ to him?”

“I—nothing! We talked! You told me to talk to him! This is your fault! Not mine!”

“I said chat him up, not make him fall in _love_ with you.” Sam crosses his arms over his chest like Blaine’s done something awful or wonderful or both. “Did you guys have cyber sex? Did you give him a hypothermical handjob?”

“Hypothetical,” Blaine corrects him, “and _no_.”

The computer beeps again.

**ryder_lynn:** _Either you’re not actualy there or you think that was creepy. I’m sorry._

Sam grabs Blaine by the shoulders and forcibly guides him into the swivel chair. “This is your mess,” he says. “You have to clean this up. This job is officially too big for me.”

“It was your idea,” Blaine says, frowning at the screen.

Still, though. He has to say something.

**dreamingof_u:** _Not creepy! It was nice. I’ve been thinking about you too._

“Thinking about reaching through the computer screen and wrapping your hands around his—”

Blaine hits Sam upside his face with a throw pillow. That seems to shut him up.

**ryder_lynn:** _Ok, cool. I know we only talked for a few hours but I feel like we really clicked, you know?_

“Ryder clicked with Katie too,” Sam points out. He parks himself on the corner of Blaine’s mattress, hovering over Blaine’s shoulder while he reads. “Maybe he’s just a super clickable dude and he doesn’t even realize it yet.”

Blaine would rather go to school without hair gel for a month than admit to Sam they’d somehow gotten around to talking about their deepest fears late last night, so he simply nods in agreement. 

**ryder_lynn:** _This might be too forward but.. do you have a boyfreind?_

Sam hoots with laughter, which is pretty unfair, coming from the guy who orchestrated this whole debacle. “Don’t,” Blaine says, pushing at his knee, hoping his cheeks aren’t actually red, like maybe it’s just too warm in the room, “you’re the one who said we’re doing this to save Ryder, right? He’s probably feeling really vulnerable right now and you’re over here laughing at him—”

“No,” Sam says, “I’m laughing at you. Maybe we didn’t need to make a profile after all. Maybe we should’ve just sent you over to his house in a wig.”

“Look. We can work with this. Okay?”

**dreamingof_u:** _I don’t. What about you? Any special girls in your life?_

“Oh, that’s good. He’ll say no, you can ask about Katie, he’ll ask how you know about Katie, you’ll say because she’s not actually real, everything’s fixed. Blam!” Sam goes up for a highfive. It seems a little cruel to lay it out like that, but then, how else was he supposed to do it? Write it on a cake and have it delivered to his house?

Blaine highfives him.

There’s a really long wait before Ryder responds, though. He and Sam sit there, and sit there, and sit there, but nothing comes. “Maybe he’s suspicious,” Sam says. “Or maybe he signed off. Ask if he’s still there.”

Blaine leans forward and types _Ryder??_ , but when he goes to press send, a notification pops up:

_Unable to connect to the internet._

He tries turning the router on and off, refreshes about twelve times, fiddles with the network settings, but nothing.

“Dude,” Sam says. “Your internet knows how to build suspense.”

x

The internet never comes back on. Blaine’s more relieved than anything else.

x

Blaine stays off of the computer for the rest of the weekend, just because he needs to buy himself a little time. In fact, he does his best to push the whole thing to the back of his mind, and it works pretty well until Monday during glee club, when he catches Ryder pulling his phone out of his pocket, frowning at it, and sliding it back in. He does this no less than three times in an hour, and it’s likely it wasn’t related to him—Samantha, whatever—at all, but still. It tugs at his stomach each and every time.

Before this whole mess, Blaine had never really noticed Ryder. He was glad he’d found a home in glee, of course, the way they all did, glad he’d made a good group of friends, and he was a good singer, a solid performer. But that was it. Now, though, Blaine’s gaze keeps gravitating towards him and—well, there was a lot that he’d missed.

His shoulders, for example. They’re incredibly broad, which isn’t a thing Blaine’s really paid attention to before now. He’s built like a football player, which—his dumb crush on Sam hadn’t been just because of his body, okay, there were other things—he’d liked tall, skinny guys before that—but Ryder didn’t exactly have a lot to worry about in the looks department. 

There was, of course, that time he’d worn spandex to glee club, but Blaine had tried really hard not to dwell on that.

All in all, he’s just an attractive guy. It’s a fact of life. He’s an attractive guy, and Blaine’s unintentionally pretending to be a girl on the internet. 

Sometimes life is strange.

x

That night, he boots up his computer with every intention of ending the whole charade. He just needs to put it out there, get it over with. It’s not fair to Ryder. It’s not fair at all.

But Ryder’s already online, and it takes a long time to figure out what he wants to say. He wants to be gentle. Nice. He doesn’t want Ryder to feel embarrassed, but he also wants Ryder to know that he’s serious.

And then Ryder messages him first.

 **ryder_lynn:** _Quick. Pizza or tacos?_

Baffled, Blaine does the only logical thing he can think of: he replies.

 **dreamingof_u:** _Tacos._  
**ryder_lynn:** _Cats or dogs?_  
**dreamingof_u:** _Dogs._  
**ryder_lynn:** _Summer or winter?_  
**dreamingof_u:** _Summer._  
**ryder_lynn:** _Mountins or beach?_  
**dreamingof_u:** _Both._  
**ryder_lynn:** _You can’t choose both!_  
**dreamingof_u:** _But I just did._

And then—Blaine’s a horrible person, he knows that he is—they just keep... talking. For an hour. For an hour they keep talking, and Ryder’s incredibly funny and really nice, even if he does make an average of two typos per minute. 

It’s not like Blaine’s desperately lonely; he is a _little_ lonely, knowing that Kurt’s got some British guy and Sam’s got Brittany and the whole glee club’s had each other at least once, it feels like, but it’s not like he’s doing this for any weird reason. It’s not like he thinks anything would—could—come of this. It’s just a nice conversation, and it’s nice to have a nice conversation.

And in the end, he’ll come clean.

Tonight, apparently, is not the end. Ryder says, _I’ve got to go, can we talk tomorow? Please? :)_ and signs off before Blaine has the chance to explain, and he spends the rest of the night burrowed in his blankets, burrowed in his shame.

x

“Did you do it?” Sam says.

“You have the worst ideas of anyone I have ever met,” Blaine tells him, which is a roundabout way of saying no. “You should feel bad for how bad your ideas are. Make a fake profile! Pretend to be a girl! Drop some life-altering bomb on him, right, Sam, that was just not a good idea.”

“You didn’t do it,” Sam says, understandingly. He pats Blaine on the shoulder. “Poor Ryder, dude. He’s being catfished twice and he doesn’t have a clue.”

x

In glee club that afternoon, Blaine sits next to Sam, like he usually does, and then Ryder sits down on his other side, which makes him drop every single thing he’d been holding. Ryder gives him a strange look but both he and Sam drop down to help him pick it all up, and when he hands Blaine’s phone back, their fingers brush, and Ryder says, “Blaine? Are you okay?” because he’s just suddenly gotten out of his seat.

“I just remembered—dentist,” he says, and he bolts from the room like a coward, and as he’s leaving, he hears Sam say, “He’s really anal about his teeth.”

x

He doesn’t sign back on for the rest of the week, but it doesn’t even matter, because Ryder starts sending him offline messages instead, and they’re all pretty harmless, but one says, _I can’t stop thinking about you,_ and Blaine wants to drown something. He wonders if whoever’s behind Katie is feeling this much guilt.

He hopes it’s ten times worse.

x

The other thing is that Ryder has begun sitting next to Blaine _every day_ in glee, and Sam, that jerk, isn’t even helpful, doesn’t even try to distract him. Ryder talks to him, too, and it’s pretty easy, flowing conversation when Blaine’s not being a bumbling idiot. This is new. He’d been an idiot around other guys before, but he’d been a pretty well put-together idiot, when he was sober, and he’s not sure he likes this new side of himself.

In fact, he knows he doesn’t like it.

“Just do it,” Sam says, like it’s that easy.

He really needs to do it.

x

Blaine, once again, enlists Sam’s help, because he clearly hasn’t accomplished anything on his own so far. Sam’s resistant, at first, but Blaine starts with, “It was _your_ idea,” and ends with blackmail about the Weight Room Incident That Neither Of Them Speak Of, and that seems to work pretty well. This time, Sam shows up with not only the stripes under his eyes, but dressed head-to-toe in black clothing, and something vaguely nylon pulled down over his hair.

“Is that _pantyhose_?” Blaine demands, stepping aside to let him in.

“Maybe,” Sam says. “Don’t tell Finn’s mom.”

They head straight to Blaine’s bedroom, which is how Blaine knows this is serious, because Sam almost always stops by the kitchen first. He drops his bag by Blaine’s bed, sits in the swivel chair, and cracks his knuckles, one by one.

“Gross,” Blaine says, staring at him. “Can you not do that?”

“I have to. It’s for dramatic effect.”

The computer’s already booted up and signed in, which Sam finds pretty disappointing. And Ryder’s already online. “Did you want a chance to, like, mourn your fake relationship?” Sam jokes, which Blaine doesn’t find very funny. It does sort of feel like the end of something personal, though. Something definitely went wrong.

“Shut up,” he says, and waves a hand at the computer. “Just—do whatever you have to do.”

 **ryder_lynn:** _Same time as last night. You’re getting predictabel._

“This’ll be like ripping a bandaid off,” Sam tells him. “Just gotta do it.” He concentrates for a few moments, typing and backspacing, rubbing his chin thoughtfully, before finally he presses enter, and then leans away so Blaine can see.

**dreamingof_u:** _do you still talk to Katie?_

There’s a long pause. Blaine holds his breath.

 **ryder_lynn:** _You know Katie??_  
**dreamingof_u** _: no...... and neither do you._

“Sam,” Blaine says, gripping his shoulder. “We don’t know how he’s going to react, what if he’s really upset—”

“He’s a grown man,” Sam answers, which isn’t even necessarily true. “He’ll be fine.”

 **ryder_lynn:** _...what???_

The next fifteen minutes are the longest of Blaine’s life. Sam explains everything, to the best of his ability, even links him to the real Katie’s website, and Ryder’s responses are sparse and short, but at least he’s still responding.

“Do you think he believes you?” Blaine asks, throwing himself back on his bed.

“Well, yeah. He kind of has to. The proof is pudding.”

Blaine lifts his head off the pillow to give Sam a strange look. “What?”

“You know. That saying. The proof is pudding.”

It’s not even worth it. Blaine drops his forehead back down.

About three minutes later, Sam clears his throat. “Well, he signed off,” he says. “He says he needed to think. He... also said he’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

“Great,” Blaine groans. “What do I do?”

“Hell if I know, dude. Want me to delete it?”

“Just like that? What about the IP thing?”

“He’s not going to be able to get your IP address, dude. I only told you that so you’d go through with my idea in the first place.”

If Blaine were holding something, he’d throw it at Sam. Unfortunately the only thing in his hands is his face, and that doesn’t come off quite so easily. “Okay. Delete it. And we’re not friends anymore,” he tells him, through the gaps in his fingers, but Sam just snorts.

“Please,” he says. “I’m the best friend you’ve ever had.” He pauses. “Outside the internet, anyway.”

That one’s worth reaching for a pillow over. He hurls it at Sam’s head, and smiles in a self-satisfactory sort of way when it makes contact with a _whomp._

x

Monday in glee club, like every day the previous week, Ryder sits next to Blaine. He seems more subdued this time; he’s certainly not checking his phone every five minutes, but he’s not exactly all smiles, either. But at least he’s _there_ , at least the truth hadn’t completely blindsided him, at least the profile deletion hadn’t been the cherry on top of a very depressing cake. A fruitcake, probably. Nobody liked fruitcakes.

Blaine sits with his hands between his knees and wonders if the guilt of the past two weeks will ever subside. Probably not. He will go to his grave wracked in shame. His headstone will read _Sorry I pretended to be someone on the internet that one time._

Things go normal, though, until Mr. Schue dismisses them, and he’s grabbing his messenger bag off the floor when Ryder puts a hand on his elbow. “Hey Blaine?” he says, and Blaine’s heart stops beating for a solid three seconds. “Can we talk?”

“Uh, sure.”

Sam shoots him a questioning look but heads out the door with the rest of them, and Blaine loiters around and wonders if it’d be easier to throw himself out the window or to hope one day he’ll be in the direct line of fire when Finn kicks one of his chairs. But maybe Ryder just wants to ask about Regionals, or hair gel, maybe. He really hopes it hair gel.

When the room is cleared, Ryder turns to face him. “So,” he says, no beating around the bush, “how’d you find out about Katie?” He makes the same stupid exaggerated quotation marks that Sam does. It’s endearing, until Blaine realizes what he’s implying.

“I—” He clears his throat, and decides it’s best to go with honesty. It is always best to go with honesty. He can’t believe it took him this long. “Sam found out, actually. You forgot to log off in the library.”

Ryder nods. “I suck at remembering to do that,” he says. “I always knew it was going to be bite me in the ass one day.” 

Blaine bites down on the inside of his cheek, and then just goes for it. “Ryder, I am _so_ sorry it happened the way it did. It really wasn’t supposed to happen like that—I swear, Sam and I thought we were doing you a favor—”

Ryder laughs, which surprises Blaine into silence. It’s not even the cruel sort of laugh. It’s like he actually thinks it’s funny. “You guys _did_ do me a favor,” he says, which surprises Blaine even more. “I deleted Katie from my profile right after you deleted. I don’t even want to know who Katie really was, I’m just glad it’s over and that I didn’t send her any pictures below-the-belt.”

“Small victories,” Blaine says, although he’s wondering why Ryder’s not beating the crap out of him. He’s certainly been beat up for less.

“No harm no foul, right? I didn’t end up on MTV and the world doesn’t have access to my junk.”

Blaine nods, and then hesitates. “So, uh—can I ask—how’d you know it was me?”

“I figured out it was Sam first, actually,” Ryder says, and he laughs again. “You guys really don’t type the same, you know that? And I was telling you—Samantha—” he gives Blaine a meaningful look “—about watching the new Spiderman movie, and the next day Sam came up to me and was like, ‘Andrew Garfield is a surprisingly awesome Peter Parker, right?’ so... I figured it out pretty fast.”

“How fast?” Blaine asks. He is going to murder Sam. He’s going to murder Sam and get away with it in court, because it will be the most justified homicide in the history of the world.

“Like... the day after we talked for the first time.”

Blaine wants to disappear in a hole, but also, Ryder had known _the entire time_ and... and kept up with the charade. “So you’re actually a genius,” Blaine says. “You were being catfished by Katie, and unintentionally catfished by us, but you were catfishing us in return. You were in on the joke.”

This time Ryder’s not laughing. In fact, he looks at Blaine sort of seriously. “It wasn’t all a joke,” he says after a moment, his voice lighter. “At least, not to me.” He shrugs. “I liked talking to you, man. Like I said. We clicked.”

Blaine’s mouth has gone strangely dry. He can’t even swallow the lump in his throat. “I liked talking to you too,” he admits. “Hence, you know, Samantha.”

He makes the stupid hand gesture this time. Ryder grins and knocks his fingers away.

“So, okay,” he says. “How about tonight you sign on your real screen name, and we can continue our conversation. No catfishing allowed.”

“Deal,” Blaine says.

They shake on it.

Ryder holds on a little too long.

x

Sam invites himself over to Blaine’s house that night, which isn’t surprising, and he helps himself to a glass of sweet tea in the fridge before making himself comfortable on Blaine’s bed. Blaine hadn’t wasted any time in informing him that their whole situation was, indeed, entirely Sam’s fault, but Sam had taken the blame a little too easily. He wasn’t big on feeling bad about stuff. Blaine both admired and hated that about him. “Come on,” Sam says an hour later, for maybe the fifth time that night. His voice has gotten progressively more whiny each time. “Let’s get a game of Call of Duty going.”

“Why,” Blaine says, from his seat at the computer, “so I can beat you again?”

“Please. You could try.”

It didn’t take a whole lot of effort. But he was busy. Talking to Ryder. 

And not even pretending to be a girl while doing it.

“Setting you two up was the worst idea I’ve ever had,” Sam announces, and that actually makes Blaine turn away from the keyboard, staring at him in disbelief.

“ _Setting us up?_ ” he repeats. “Don’t act like you _planned_ this.”

“I knew he was thirsty for the d,” Sam insists. He puts his hand on his stomach, drags his tshirt up to reveal a small strip of stomach. “And I know _you_ like the football playing types,” he adds, shooting Blaine a smug wink.

Blaine tackles Sam off of the mattress and pins him unceremoniously to the floor. He figures Ryder wouldn’t mind waiting for that.


End file.
